]]>“I am convinced that the kids from the most challenging circumstances are also the grittiest, the most determined. and have the biggest capacity for compassion,” says buildOn’s founder Jim Ziolkowski, who started the volunteer service organization to fulfill the social justice aspect of his Catholic faith.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Early each morning in the chapel of St. Damien’s Children’s Hospital, the shrouded bodies of infants—and one adult on this day—are counted, the names written down for prayers that follow at daily Mass.

REV. RICHARD FRECHETTE: Anybody that dies in our arms, as they say in Creole, in our place, then their body is first brought to the chapel so that the very next Mass we have the prayers for the dead and for their peace and for the transformation of their life to eternity and for the strength and courage of their family.

DE SAM LAZARO: Father Rick Frechette spends much of his day attacking the infant mortality he sees so literally each morning. He’s the founder of one of the largest medical care facilities for children and many adults in Haiti. It’s grown by necessity, often out of tragedy. Frechette is a member of the Community of Passionists, a global Catholic order, and he began 25 years ago with what seemed a more straightforward mission: a shelter and school for orphans. Today, 800 children are housed at several centers. This one, taking in the overflow, functions out of converted shipping containers. The shelter’s young managers themselves grew up here. Billy Jean is one. He was brought at age three to NPH, the orphanage’s local acronym. Today, he works to master English and is in law school.

BILLY JEAN: My mother became pregnant very early, about 16 years old, and my father took off, and then my mother couldn’t take care of me. She heard about NPH and she decided to put me there…

DE SAM LAZARO: His mother visits occasionally, he says, but the orphanage is very much his family.

REV. FRECHETTE: That’s our goal, to restore the family over one generation, to raise the children together so they have memories of their own childhood, restored childhood, and that later in life they become aunts and uncles to each other’s children and their family regenerates after a generation. That’s our goal, so we have community of families that have been broken by tragedy.

DE SAM LAZARO: The tragedy of Haiti’s AIDS epidemic, beginning in the nineties, brought big change for the organization and Frechette himself. HIV was bringing in very ill children that the orphanages were ill-equipped to care for.

REV. FRECHETTE: That really engraved itself hard on my memory. Seeing such terrible things and honestly not having a clue, not having a clue as to what to do.

DE SAM LAZARO: Frechette received permission from his order to go to medical school, a multiyear commitment which he completed in his mid 40s. Back in Haiti, his newly-acquired expertise, combined with astute fundraising, resulted in a modern pediatric hospital. It expanded with a new building in 2006, the largest of its kind in the country, with a 22-bed center for neonatology.

DR. GAUTIER: We have central oxygen. We can offer CPAP, which is external ventilation.

DE SAM LAZARO: (to Dr. Gautier) So on any given day, you have 22 kids in here who would not have lived were it not for this facility?

DR. GAUTIER: Correct. All the 22s are not very intensive. Half of it. Half of them.

DE SAM LAZARO: Many of these premature births result from conditions like hypertension or diabetes in the mothers. For them, a maternity unit was added in 2010 after the capital’s major hospital for high risk pregnancies was destroyed.

DR. GAUTIER: Fortunately, 2010 we were not really damaged by the earthquake. It was a few cracks. A few cracks only.

DE SAM LAZARO: The quake did not damage this hospital, but it quickly overwhelmed it.

DR. GAUTIER: The yard was transformed into a trauma center. We had patients everywhere.

DE SAM LAZARO: In a few weeks, Frechette says the decision was made to use donations that were pouring in to start a new adult hospital. Ten months later, a cholera ward had to be added after the deadly outbreak that killed nearly 5,000 people in its first year.

REV. FRECHETTE: So we kind of mushroomed out in response to all of these problems. I think the surprise to everybody, including to us, is that we could do it all pretty much without batting an eyelash. And the real wonder of it, to tell you the truth, this is a country of no infrastructures practically, and it’s a country of failed NGOs.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says three years after the quake, despite billions of dollars given to thousands of NGOs—non-government organizations—the rebuilding has been painfully slow.

REV. FRECHETTE: There’s too much disjointedness. It’s goodwill, and it should be recognized fully as that and appreciated, but it doesn’t get channeled in a way that makes sense, and in fact it’s a way that gets disruptive.

DE SAM LAZARO: Many smaller NGOs, often church-based, have come and gone as their funding allowed. Bureaucracy has slowed larger agencies as they’ve planned major projects in housing, clean water and sanitation. Some 360,000 earthquake victims remain displaced in tent camps. For it’s part, Frechette’s organization took in $9 million in earthquake-related donations. Its approach now is focused on community.

RAPHAEL LOUIGENE (Project Manager): (translation) Organizations come in with their own ideas and do things their own way. The way that Fr. Rick works is we don’t come into a community and give our idea of what to do and how to do it. We listen to the community, listen to their needs because they know them the best, and then we work together to accomplish it.

DE SAM LAZARO: In the sprawling Port au Prince slum called Cite Soleil, the group is partnering with the community to build homes to replace the sea of shacks and squalor. They’re simple two room structures built on the principle that if you wait to do things right, nothing will get done for years, prolonging the suffering.

REV. FRECHETTE: The way that we look at it and explain it to our donors, we’re investing in the purchase of time. You know, they’re simple block structures, we make most of the blocks ourselves. They’re simple aluminum roofs. It’s more towards normal than anything that they have known, but we’re just buying time while the people with big money and big plans, an interwoven network of organizations can do a proper urban development. That’s what we’re doing.

DE SAM LAZARO: They’re also doing health care here. A new facility is being built in Cite Soleil. All told, about 1,800 Haitians work for the mission begun by Frechette. Hundred of thousands have been served in orphanages, schools and hospitals. Funding comes from private individuals, foundations, and government grants. This year, Frechette was awarded the one million dollar Opus Prize, given to a faith-based social entrepreneur by the Minnesota-based Opus Foundation.

Frechette himself does not see his work in charitable or heroic terms.

REV. FRECHETTE: Rather than saying, I gave you this chance, I say, I was fortunate. I had that chance. It came to me. I didn’t make it. And we want that same chance to come to you so that we have the same chance. We’re people who care by being the bridge between resources that have benefited us in our life for our education and well-being, and we just want to be the bridge for letting that happen by people who have their own capacity and dreams.

DE SAM LAZARO: A long road, he admits, where success is built one small stretch at a time.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Cite Soleil, Haiti.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the height of last year’s devastating famine in the Horn of Africa, Rajiv Shah, administrator of the US Agency for International Development, visited a refugee camp in Kenya. There were thousands of families who had walked for days to escape starvation in Somalia. He says one woman’s story particularly touched him.

DR. RAJIV SHAH (Administrator, US Agency for International Development): Along the way, she literally couldn’t continue to carry both of her kids, and she had to make this gut wrenching choice about which child she would carry to safety and which one she would leave behind, and that’s the kind of decision that no mother should ever have to make.

LAWTON: Shah says encounters like that bolster his conviction that the US has a moral obligation to help ease suffering around the world. It’s an obligation, he says, that’s also in America’s strategic interest.

SHAH: We’re a nation based on moral values, and when we express those values to communities around the world, we’re showing them an America that is an optimistic America, an inclusive America, and a country with whom they want to partner and not fight.

SHAH: We want to do our work, which is about protecting people who are vulnerable around the world and expanding the reach of human dignity, as broadly as possible. and often it is communities of faith, faith-based organizations, that are there working when the rest of the world has forgotten about people who have no other place to turn.

LAWTON: At 38, Shah is one of the Obama administration’s youngest top-ranking officials. He is Hindu and says his interest in humanitarian issues was first fostered by his parents, who immigrated to the US from India.

SHAH: When I was seven or eight years old, I don’t remember exactly when, I went to visit India, and they took me through slum communities just so I could see how people lived. And I grew up in suburban Detroit. I’d never been exposed to that before. And when you see other kids your age, when you’re seven or eight years old, living in entirely different circumstances, it affects you in a very profound way, and it has led to a constant motivation I’ve had.

LAWTON: Shah took over at USAID on January 7, 2010, just five days before the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. He was immediately pulled into managing what would become the largest humanitarian response in history. After the quake, USAID worked closely with several faith-based organizations to provide food and shelter. Shah says he saw firsthand the effectiveness of those groups.

SHAH: Partners like World Vision or Catholic Relief Services that take the time to engage with communities they’re trying to serve, that are willing to be there for the long run, that work in partnership and cooperation with governments so that they are coordinating their efforts and getting the most out of what we—the investments we make.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (delivering speech): I want to acknowledge one particular member of my administration who I’m extraordinarily proud of and does not get much credit, and that is USAID Administrator Dr. Raj Shah, who is doing great work with faith leaders. Where’s Raj? Where is he? There he is, right there.

LAWTON: Under Shah’s leadership, the Obama administration has increased its partnerships with religious groups by more than 50 percent. According to Shah, USAID now has 115 different partnerships with organizations of faith around the world, and he hopes to expand that even further.

LAWTON: What is it that faith groups bring to the table in these partnerships?

SHAH: Well, I think it’s a core motivation that’s driven by a desire to get results. Organizations that are committed to the outcomes, that measure results, that ensure that scarce taxpayer dollars are in fact benefiting those who are most vulnerable often are communities of faith, and we want to work with them to achieve those results.

LAWTON: Government partnerships with faith groups have been controversial. Some critics worry about the US being tied to the religious mission of a particular group or taxpayer money being used for explicitly religious activities, such as evangelizing.

SHAH: Those are not activities we support. You know, we have a very clear set of defined outcomes and results that we’re willing to finance and that we believe we can support, and, you know, frankly, if you look at the broad range of what faith community groups are doing around the world, it’s actually service.

LAWTON: Another controversial partner has been the military. Some nongovernmental groups have criticized the growing role of the US military in disaster relief, especially in areas where the US has been at war. But Shah says it can work. He cites Haiti as a model.

SHAH: Many of our NGO partners and others who had previously been sometimes nervous about working with the military came back and said, wow, they were, they were great to work with, they were so responsive to our needs and the needs of local communities and they were really there to serve. And I’m just very proud of the way American men and women in the armed services conducted themselves in Haiti, and they made us all proud.

LAWTON: Is there a concern, though, about the perception of the US humanitarian arm too linked with the military side?

SHAH: I don’t think we should be concerned about perceptions. I think we should be concerned about results and outcomes, and at times of crisis we will turn to whomever we can, whenever we can, to help save lives and protect people.

LAWTON: Shah says in an era of budget cutting, US faith leaders from across the religious and political spectrum have played an important role lobbying Congress to keep funding for programs that help the world’s poor.

SHAH: When people see that great coming together, it reminds us all that on some basic moral issues, we can stand together even in sometimes partisan environments.

LAWTON: But he admits in the current climate, it can be difficult to make the argument to maintain foreign aid funding, even though it represents less than one percent of the federal budget.

SHAH: At the end of the day when you ask Americans what we should be spending abroad, they’ll say about 10 percent of the budget. Unfortunately they believe we spend 20 percent and so we have a lot to do to communicate the fact that this is a relatively small investment.

LAWTON: Shah says resources must always be allocated for humanitarian disasters. But he says the administration wants to put a new focus on long-term initiatives as well.

SHAH: It turns out that for about a tenth the cost, somewhere between one-eighth and one-tenth the cost of feeding someone for a year, you can help invest in their ability to move themselves out of poverty.

LAWTON: And he says the government is well aware that communities of faith have vast potential resources that can be enlisted in the battle.

SHAH: There are 330,000 congregations in this country that represent–I think the top ten alone reach more than 100 million people. You know, if we could just reach a small fraction of that community, that’s our vision of success.

SONYA YENCER (Red Thread Promise): The name of the Red Thread Promise came from an ancient Chinese proverb that talks about a silken red thread of destiny that connects everybody. In Haiti, disabled children are often not treated well, they are often neglected, sometimes abused, abandoned. So, following the earthquake, the majority of St. Vincent ‘s original school and clinic and church was completely destroyed and there was only one building left standing. Anything that wasn’t destroyed was looted.

REV. SCOTT ALBERGATE (St. Paul’s Episcopal Church): It was clear right away the connection between New Orleans and Haiti. St. Paul’s is the most devastated of our churches in Katrina. And, with its story of rebuilding completely on faith and with the spirit too at the same time. Not just to rebuild themselves but to pay forward all of the blessings that this church received.

KATHY KORGE ALBERGATE (Red Thread Promise): When the earthquake hit in Haiti, I said, you know what, we need wheelchairs there. We need wheelchairs that are going to handle the terrain. We had over 24 churches in the United States contributing for one full container of wheelchairs, crutches, canes. Our Diocese reached out. They did it. Janie and Grant heard about the wheelchair program through church and they saw it in the hallway and they wanted to do a fundraiser. They came to us. We didn’t ask them. But, many children at St. Paul’s and in our school here, in the church and school came to us with different fundraisers.
We have given the children brand new wheelchairs, their own, that are fit for them. Little Diana went from an adult wheelchair that was falling apart to this teeny tiny little petite wheelchair. We saw her glow. We’ve given teenage boys an opportunity to play basketball now by having a wheelchair that they can twirl around in. It’s been incredible.

So if we do nothing else other than to make sure they have proper food, water and a chance to have a good education, we feel accomplished, we feel like we’ve paid it forward. We’re doing something to help.

YENCER: I think people can choose to grasp that red thread of destiny, choose to acknowledge that it’s there. That we really are connected. That these are our brothers and sisters regardless of the color of our skin or where we grew up. You know, it’s humanity that brings us all together.

]]>BOB ABERNETHY, host: As the slow recovery continues in Haiti after last year’s earthquake, there’s a new book out called Haiti after the Earthquake. It’s by the much-admired Paul Farmer, a medical doctor, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, and a cofounder of the humanitarian aid group Partners in Health. For a quarter of a century, Farmer has worked, primarily in Haiti but in other countries, too, to provide good medical care to the poorest of the poor.

Farmer was in Washington this week signing books and talking about what he says are the two big challenges of relief and reconstruction: helping individuals in need, as so many faith-based groups do, and at the same time building up public health, public education, and other systems that help everyone. Farmer spoke as the head of one of the hundreds of aid organizations in Haiti.

PAUL FARMER: But we said what are we doing wrong, and we decided that what we are doing wrong is to allow the continued degradation and collapse of the public sector, the institutions of that country, the public institutions, allow them to collapse even as we grow. That’s not the way to build Haiti back better.

ABERNETHY: I asked Farmer about the faith-based nongovernmental organizations. His answer was a surprise.

(to Farmer): I am wondering, since the earthquake, how do you assess the effectiveness, the usefulness, and the problems that need to be learned for people that go there with a strong religious motivation to try to help the least of these?

FARMER: I would say, let’s not give ourselves more than a C.

ABERNETHY: Farmer says the NGOs have done a good job helping people one by one, but he also suggests that they have not done enough to help Haitians create a government and other institutions capable of taking on big projects, like reforesting the mountains and cleaning up the water.

FARMER: Church groups, mosque-related groups, synagogue-related groups, it’s not necessarily their mission to go and promote water security, but if it’s their mission to help their neighbors, which it always is, then we’re going to have to think, you know, rethink and think hard about how we’re going to, you know, work together.

ABERNETHY: Farmer has many Haitian friends, and he speaks Creole. He knows how hard life is there, but he also says the resilience of the Haitian people is the country’s greatest asset.

FARMER: If they can still have some optimism and believe in their future—if these people can have optimism then we can, too.

Watch more of Sunday morning worship services at Parc Chretien Free Methodist Church; in a tent next to the ruined Roman Catholic Our Lady of the Assumption Cathedral; and in an open-air structure next to the destroyed Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, and see more of correspondent Kim Lawton’s interviews with Rick Ireland, administrator of the Free Methodist Haiti Inland Mission, and Bishop Jean-Zache Duracin of the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti. Edited by R & E news researcher Emma Mankey Hidem.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Driving through downtown Port-au-Prince, it’s difficult at first to see much change since we were last here nine months ago. The presidential palace is still in ruins. Thousands are living in a massive tent city across the street, and according to aid officials, more than a million Haitians are still homeless. Around the corner from the palace, people are living in tents on the grounds of the destroyed Roman Catholic cathedral. There, piles of rubble and broken stained glass still fill what was once a beautiful hundred-year-old sanctuary. But despite appearances, faith-based workers who have been active here over the past year insist there has been progress in dealing with this humanitarian catastrophe.

NICOLE PETER (Haiti Operations Director, World Vision): The progress is slow, maybe not as quick as other emergencies, but we’re moving forward.

LAWTON: Nicole Peter is the Haiti operations director for the Christian group World Vision, which has already spent more than $100 million in post-earthquake work. They’ve been involved in a variety of projects including shelter, water and sanitation, job creation, education, and family support. One example of their work is the Corail displaced persons camp on a windy, flood-prone field outside the capital city.

In April, the government of Haiti moved almost 7,000 people to this location about an hour outside Port-au-Prince. But there were no preparations. There were no essential services or infrastructure, so nongovernmental agencies had to step in to help the people. World Vision and other agencies provided sturdy tents to help withstand the elements. Groups brought in latrines and clean water and set up schools. The government still hasn’t developed a long-term housing and resettlement plan for the people here, so World Vision has begun building even sturdier transitional shelters.

MARY KATE MACISSAC (World Vision): We had to negotiate with donors to convince them that timber frames were necessary. They said that those were perhaps too permanent, but we said no, these people need something strong.

LAWTON: The houses are designed to last up to seven years. They can withstand winds up to 100 miles per hour, and in typical Haitian style they all have a front porch. One of the residents, Jeanne, invited me to sit on her front porch with several of the seven children who live here with her. She says she loves this house, and she’s grateful the kids are able to attend school. She says she’d like to get a small business going, so she can feed her children better.

Mary Kate MacIssac says there’s been a lot of criticism from the outside media—and even some donors—that more hasn’t been done. She’s also frustrated by the slow pace, but she says people don’t fully understand the realities on the ground.

MACISSAC: Haiti was a country that was facing humanitarian crisis even before the earthquake. Then you have a massive earthquake hit an urban center, the capital of a country, and it’s a complexity of urban disaster that agencies have not had to deal with before.

LAWTON: Adding to that complexity is a rising cholera epidemic. World Vision has set up cholera treatment units near various tent camps. Visitors are disinfected before they enter and when they leave. According to the official numbers, more than 150,000 people have now come down with cholera, and nearly 3,500 have died. Aid groups say the numbers are vastly under-reported. On this morning, 10 people have already been brought in for treatment, including a five-year-old boy who is also being treated for malnutrition.

PETER: It’s a new emergency within an emergency, so it’s basically heightening issues that existed previously.

LAWTON: Rick Ireland, administrator of the Free Methodist Haiti Inland Mission, is also all too familiar with the complexities here. After the earthquake hit, denominational officials asked him to get to Haiti immediately. The Free Methodist mission had suffered tragic losses. This multistory building on their compound was completely destroyed. The American administrator of the mission, Reverend Jeanne Munos, was killed. Two other American workers and a Haitian staffer also died in the collapse. Ireland had to oversee rubble removal, restore missions operations, and help coordinate relief and reconstruction.

REV. RICK IRELAND (Free Methodist Haiti Inland Mission): Everything is just a little bit harder here, and that does get discouraging.

LAWTON: The Free Methodists have been working through local churches like this one. Sunday morning services here start at 6 am. Shoe-shine vendors line up out front to help congregants look their Sunday best, while local taxis called “tap-taps” keep bringing more worshipers. With over 2,000 people, it’s standing room only. Ireland says this is the best resource to aid Haiti’s recovery.

IRELAND: They knew their community. The pastors, both their church people and the non-church people, were very aware of where the needs were.

LAWTON: They’ve been rebuilding churches and schools and training people how to construct something that will withstand any earthquakes in the future.

IRELAND: We trained Haitian civil engineers how to build earthquake-resistant buildings, and from that group the Haitian teams went out all over Haiti and did a number of seminars teaching people how to build earthquake-proof buildings.

LAWTON: Across from a UN displacement camp is one of those schools. It isn’t quite finished, but enrollment has already doubled from last year. They are also providing clean water for the entire community.

IRELAND: We really have tried to step alongside the Haitians and say, “Here are the resources we have, here’s the challenge. How do you think we can best do this?”

LAWTON: One local pastor who has been leading the Free Methodist efforts is Jean-Marc Zamor, who also has a larger vision for Haiti. He took us down bumpy roads heading to a remote location where he wants to build a Christian university that will focus on character and leadership development and train people to work in the public sector.

REV. JEAN-MARC ZAMOR: After the earthquake, it’s become more and more difficult to find good professionals, and that’s give me even a higher conviction that this is what we need to do now. We need to train people that will carry on the work.

LAWTON: He and a team of other Haitian leaders used their own money to buy 200 acres of land. They’ve hired local workers to begin pouring the foundation of their first building, and they hope to have students by the fall. He gets frustrated that many outsiders see all Haitians as needy victims.

ZAMOR: There are a lot of people living with cholera, a lot of people in need. But Haiti is not only that. At the same time, there are a lot of people doing a lot of things, a lot of work going on. Otherwise, we would not survive.

LAWTON: Local leaders are also active in the response of Haiti’s Episcopal Church. Crowded Sunday morning services here are now being held in an open-air structure with a tin roof. It’s right next to the ruins of the Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, which was completely destroyed in the quake. The church had been known around the world for its magnificent art work. Once a month, the congregation takes a special offering for the reconstruction of the cathedral. Episcopalians have been active in post-earthquake recovery. I asked the bishop how they will decide whether money should go to helping people or rebuilding the cathedral.

BISHOP JEAN-ZACHE DURACIN (Episcopal Diocese of Haiti): It is a symbol. People may think that, people may say, oh, there are so people in tents and we are going to build big cathedral, and so on. No, it is a symbol of faith. It has always been so.

LAWTON: And, indeed, for many in this predominantly Christian nation faith has been key to survival.

IRELAND: They’re filled with tremendous hope. It’s unbelievable, because it would be so easy just to give up, and they haven’t given up. They really believe that the future can be better.

LAWTON: At the Corail camp, World Vision’s Mary Kate MacIssac says she sees hope in the gardens people are planting near their temporary shelters and in the small businesses that are popping up—and in people like Jeanne’s daughter, Diana. She and her sister wrote a song that says despite the earthquake, they will always believe in God.

MACISSAC: People who continue to believe in a God that loves them is really quite remarkable.

ZAMOR: Haiti is not dying. I think we have taken a lot of time to get started. Once we get started, we will be well on our way, and we will be where we need to be in a couple of years. We are not dying.

LAWTON: Given the enormity of the problems that still exist, that hope is likely to continue being tested.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Kim, welcome back.

LAWTON: Thank you.

ABERNETHY: How representative, how typical are those people, those hopeful people you talked to?

LAWTON: Well, I was surprised to hear anybody even mention the word “hope,” given the enormity of the situation there, but I did hear people wanting to say we are moving forward. Yet no one is suggesting that things are great or things are where they should be. There’s a lot of frustration. A lot of people are tired. And so that is definitely the reality, but within that they are hopeful that they are laying the basis for some real long-term improvement.

ABERNETHY: But the general impression I have is that most people here think that these relief efforts, these emergency efforts, are not going very well and that they are taking an awful long time.

LAWTON: I kept hearing a lot of frustration in Haiti about that criticism. They are saying look, we’ve been doing so much but the situation has been so complicated. I talked to one relief worker. She’d been in Gaza. She’d been in Iraq. She just came from Afghanistan straight to Haiti, and she said Haiti is a lot more difficult than any of those other places, and people in the outside don’t realize that. They don’t realize the realities they are dealing with and the layer upon layer of complication that make things take time.

ABERNETHY: What are the worst problems?

LAWTON: Well, obviously the government. There’s been a government in transition. We are awaiting a new election. There’s been political unrest surrounding that. A lot of the international money is tied to the government having a plan, and so the donors from the outside don’t want to give money or legally can’t give the money unless the government has a master plan. Well, if there’s not a good government, a strong government, there’s no government plan, then that money can’t come in and people can’t move forward. That’s one problem. There’s corruption. Haiti was in a bad situation before the earthquake, very little infrastructure, and so all of those things piled together on top of they also had a hurricane and then the cholera epidemic. So it’s just complication upon complication.

ABERNETHY: There are two phases—the relief effort, the emergency relief effort which seems to be going on still a year later, and on the other hand long-term development, investment in new jobs and things like that. When are we going to get—when are the Haitians going to get to that second phase?

LAWTON: Well, some of it’s happening hand in hand, or the beginning of development is happening even as relief work is going forward. A lot of the Haitians I spoke with want to do it themselves. They want to be able to be self-sustaining, and they believe that for any lasting solution that’s the way it’s going to have to be. But they admit that takes time, and so that’s part of the problem as well.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Welcome, I’m Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us for this special report on the most important religion and ethics news of the year that’s almost over. Our panelists are E.J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a professor at Georgetown University; also Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service, and Kim Lawton, managing editor of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. We begin with a video reminder of the major events of 2010 assembled by Kim.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: It was a challenging year for interfaith relations, as American Muslims faced new tensions on several fronts. Plans for an Islamic cultural center near the site of Ground Zero generated a firestorm of debate and protest.

Protester: No mosque, not here, not now, not ever.

LAWTON: And the proposed construction of mosques in other communities generated opposition as well. A Florida pastor’s announced intention to burn the Quran on the anniversary of 9/11 set off an international furor, including violent protests in several Muslim nations. The pastor eventually backed off his plan, but controversy continued. Leaders from several faith traditions joined with Islamic leaders to denounce what they called “growing Islamophobia” across the country. Meanwhile, amid several high-profile arrests of American Muslims allegedly plotting terrorist attacks, US mainstream Islamic groups launched new campaigns to combat extremism within their communities.

Imam speaking to Muslim students: Nonviolence, the sanctity of life is valued, and it’s not the sanctity of Muslim life, it’s the sanctity of all life.

Despite some limited signs of economic recovery, many American families continued to face unemployment and foreclosures. Religious institutions were called upon to do more to help the needy even as they dealt with their own sustained budget cuts.

On the political front, religious conservatives appeared to be reenergized by the Tea Party movement and its campaign for limited government. Although the focus of the midterm elections was on economics, many religious right activists were hopeful a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives will provide momentum for their social agenda. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats were criticized for failing to reach out more to religious voters. Many faith-based moderates and liberals were disappointed that President Obama did not employ more religious rhetoric when he discussed issues like health care and the economy. And according to one survey, growing numbers of Americans, nearly one in five, believe incorrectly that President Obama is a Muslim.

Issues surrounding homosexuality continued to pose difficult challenges for many in the religious community. Faith groups were on both sides of the issue as Congress debated lifting don’t ask don’t tell, the 17-year-old ban on gays serving openly in the military. They also filed briefs on both sides in several court cases over gay marriage. The Episcopal Church installed its second openly gay bishop, Reverend Mary Glasspool, a lesbian.

The Roman Catholic Church confronted the ongoing clergy sex abuse crisis, this time centered in several European countries, and there were more questions about how high-ranking church officials dealt with the crisis. Pope Benedict XVI offered renewed apologies about the problem and promised new guidelines for handling allegations of abuse.

Faith-based charities scrambled to meet needs in the wake of several humanitarian disasters. Here in the US, social service groups tried to help people along the Gulf Coast after the devastating BP oil spill. In Pakistan, religious relief groups rushed to deliver aid after a summer of massive flooding that has left an estimated four million people still homeless. And for nearly a year now, faith-based groups have been actively working in Haiti, providing emergency aid and helping to rebuild after the January 12 earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people and displaced almost two million. A rising cholera epidemic is complicating those efforts.

ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks for that. To you and to Kevin Eckstrom and to E.J. Dionne, welcome. I want to get to churches and politics and economics, jobs in just a minute, but first, Kevin, what do you make of all this Islamophobia?

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): It’s an extraordinary place for us to be in 2010. The most extreme example you can think of on this was in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where a zoning dispute over whether or not to build a mosque, whether they had the right to build a mosque, turned into a debate over whether Islam is actually a religion or not. And we saw it in New York in Ground Zero with the Park 51 mosque that Kim referred to in her piece. And what you saw this year was a fundamental debate over whether or not American Muslims are in a separate category or should be in a separate category from everyone else in terms of their rights, their responsibilities, and their place at the American table. And, you know, when you have a Florida pastor who can come out of nowhere and threaten to burn a pile of Qurans and get a call from the secretary of defense you know that we are not in …

LAWTON: … asking him not to do it …

ECKSTROM: That’s right. You know that we are not in an ordinary year when it comes to American Muslims.

ABERNETHY: But meanwhile there were legitimate threats. There was a Time Square bomber and others.

LAWTON: And this put a lot of pressure on the American Muslim community, as we saw, as they were trying to portray this message that Islam is not the same as terrorism. They are not mutually the same thing. But yet there were these arrests, and so they were really having to confront their own ideology and how they get their message across, and that was a big challenge for them this past year.

E.J. DIONNE (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): You know, we as a country have gone through bouts of this before, and I think when we confront this now it’s worth looking back. We had a party in our country formed in the 1850s in response to the big Catholic immigration, the American Party, also known as the Know Nothings, and it took us a long time to work through anti-Catholic prejudice. It wasn’t until 1960 that John Kennedy was elected president. We had enormous fights over the Mormons and their role in our society. I think what may be most distressing about this year is that the issue of reaction to Islam has become politicized in a way that it wasn’t immediately after 9/11. You know, it’s worth remembering that right after 9/11 President Bush went out of his way to visit the Islamic center here in DC. It kind of took any political sort of edge off this. I think in this election you have more of it occurring on the right and among Republicans. It was used in the campaigns by some Republican congressional candidates, and I think you are going to need some spokespeople on the conservative side who are very much opposed to Islamophobia to speak out so we can sort of go back to the moment, oddly, that we had after 9/11 when their was a lot of opposition in the country to Islamophobia, because everybody understood our need for Muslim allies around the world.

LAWTON: Well I was just going to go on top of that to say that it’s also been a challenge for leaders of other faith traditions. Muslims are looking to them, saying some of you experienced this yourselves. Where are you? Are you supporting us? Are you supporting our religious freedom? And you have seen some high-profile press conferences and statements by some of the leaders of the national religious organizations. Some Muslims wish that there were more of that going on. But I also think in some local communities, as a response to this protest in the streets, there are more interfaith dialogues going on at the local synagogue and at the local church as people try to figure out what is going on within the religious community.

ABERNETHY: There’s a correlation, isn’t there, with what’s happening to jobs and the economy and the fear a lot of people have about everything. And E.J., I wanted to ask you to move from this into the election of 2010, the Tea Party, and how some of these things appeared in the election returns.

DIONNE: What was striking about the election overall is that it didn’t shift religious alignments very much. I mean the Democrats lost ground pretty well across the board, not only among more religious voters but also among more secular voters, partly because a lot of their people didn’t show up this time around. But the Tea Party is fascinating, because on the one hand the poll data makes it very clear that there is a substantial overlap between support for the Tea Party and support for the religious conservative movement. But there is also some difference between the two. The Tea Party is mildly more secular, but what I think it is even more than the Christian conservatives were is a kind of assertively nationalist movement, and that there is a feeling—I think there is a feeling in the country that we have lost ground as a nation in the world over the last 10 years. That feels part of it. There is certainly some uncertainty over the economy, and that feeds a kind of “let’s take care of our own first” feeling in the country. And so I think watching the relationship between this new Tea Party movement and the older religious conservative movement is going to be one of the most interesting stories between now and the 2012 election.

ABERNETHY: And there was this phrase that we heard often—“We want to take back the country.” How do you transpose that? How do you interpret that?

DIONNE: Many people interpret this depending on their own politics, you know. Some people look at it and say this is a reaction to immigration and it’s a reaction of traditionally white or Anglo-Saxon Americans to the growing diversity of America. I think some people might look at it in more economic terms and say, boy, did we feel more secure 30 years ago. There was less income inequality 30 years ago. Average people could count on sort of decently paying jobs no matter what their education level was. Some of it is connected to that, and I think some of it is this sense of who are in the world now compared especially to China, but to some degree compared to India, and a lot of politicians are speaking more about American exceptionalism, we are still an exceptional nation, and I think that comes from a desire to hold on to that sense and that it’s been threatened by the downturn, by a sense our power has been depleted by the two long wars we’ve been in. And so I think there is this spiritual element to what is a national discussion about our national standing.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, between the parties did we see a God gap again in this last election?

LAWTON: Well, that’s what people used to talk about, the God gap—that Democrats appeared to be less friendly towards religion than Republicans, and President Obama and his campaign in the last presidential election and the Democratic Party had really seemed to make an effort to change that and had really reached out to the religious community. I’ve been surprised at the difficulty of President Obama’s relationship with the religious community over this past year. A lot of religious moderates and liberals have been very frustrated with him and some of his policies. They’ve been disappointed he hasn’t been speaking more about religion, and a lot of their community were frustrated that the Democratic Party didn’t appear to be reaching out to them in the past midterm election, so some of that separation still seems to be there.

ECKSTROM: I think the most interesting God gap you saw this year was the gap between perception and reality on whether or not the president is a Muslim or not.

ABERNETHY: What do you make of that?

ECKSTROM: I think when people say that he is a Muslim or that they think that he’s a Muslim, they are certainly not saying it as a compliment. It’s a way of smearing someone now in America in 2010. If you don’t like them, you can say that they are a Muslim. It’s a way of saying that he’s different, that he’s other, that he’s not like the rest of us. But you know, you have a president who speaks in Christian terminology, who went to church on Easter, who talked about finding salvation at the foot of the cross and all this. And yet there’s this gap, this interminable gap that they can’t seem to quite get over. As much as he talks, as many places as he goes, people still want to think that he’s not quite like us, and the Islam label or the Muslim label is a way of expressing that.

DIONNE: And I think there’s another side to it which Kim talked about in that excellent piece—more information per second that any video this year—and that is that President Obama talked quite a lot about religion and his own faith and his own views on the relationship between religion and public life from 2006 to 2008 when he was running for president. I think he’s done a lot less of that in the White House. Now he might defend himself saying I had awfully big problems to deal with out there. Nonetheless, I think that was a missing piece in the way he talked about issues. It was a missing piece partly, I think, on the grounds of persuasion; that providing an underlying philosophical rationale for what he was doing would have helped him, I think, in these two years. But also it’s a sort of a missing piece of who he is, and I think he does need to talk more about it. And it’s not just that minority that sees him as Muslim. I think there’s a minority that dislikes President Obama that would say almost anything about him. But there’s a larger group that just doesn’t have a sense of exactly who he is in this area, and I think he addressed it really well, I think, his critics believed that, from ’06 to ’08. I think he needs to address is again.

LAWTON: And it showed up in issues such as the health care debate or the economic issues, where a lot of times during the campaign trail he would use the phrase “we are our brothers’ keepers, we are our sisters’ keepers.” He would frame issues like health care as a moral issue and use sometimes religious language to talk about that, and he hasn’t done that as much in the Oval Office, and that has frustrated faith-based activists on the ground who believe that and who use that kind of language to mobilize their own people.

ABERNETHY: The recession continues and hurts everybody, and not least churches. Anybody want to talk about what the job problem has meant in churches?

LAWTON: Well, they’re having to do more to help people in their congregations. A lot of food banks and faith-based social services are saying they are seeing more and more people coming to them. People, middle-class people who’d never gone to a food bank before in their lives are now having to do that because of the ongoing economic problems, and at the same time religious institutions, like everybody else, are making budget cuts and slashing staff because of the difficulties.

ABERNETHY: Pastors, assistant pastors, associate pastors out of work.

LAWTON: A lot of congregations talk about that, really cutting back.

ECKSTROM: And what I’m hearing from clergy is that the recession that began in 2008 is actually now sort of catching up in reality with people as they are making their pledge payments for 2011 or going forward, where they are saying I’d like to pledge the same that I did last year but my husband just lost his job or we just don’t have as much money this year. So there’s going to be some difficult choices facing American congregations going forward from here about how they balance lower income from the pews with demand increase for services.

DIONNE: I was so struck in Kim’s piece that she kept coming back to what religious institutions are doing in the charitable sphere, whether it’s for the unemployed here or the suffering folks in Pakistan, and I think sort of one of the good news stories of the year was the publication of a book called “American Grace” by Bob Putnam of Harvard, David Campbell of Notre Dame, where they found that American—first of all, there is an enormous amount of charity that comes out of the religious community in America and that people connected to religious institutions seem to have more of a proclivity toward doing that, and that there is a kind of built-in religious tolerance in the country because of our religious diversity. It was actually a very optimistic book about the nature of religion in America, and I think Kim’s piece kind of underscored that.

ABERNETHY: Kevin, social issues. Don’t ask don’t tell was repealed. Proposition 8—I don’t know where that stands; maybe you do. Talk about those a little bit.

ECKSTROM: It was a significant year for the gay movement in all of its various forms. Gay and lesbian soldiers will now be able to serve in the military openly. On the marriage front, you had a federal court strike down California’s ban on gay marriage, and I think the most significant and often overlooked part of that ruling was that the judge said that religious feelings about homosexuality, religious bias if you will, is not enough to legislate on—that whatever your religious feelings are on the issue, that that’s not enough when it comes to civil rights, and that’s a fairly significant finding, and he found it as a finding of law, a finding of fact—that it wasn’t disputable, and that’s going to be going forward. But you also see in the sort of conservative resurgence that there’s a lot of resistance to going too fast on this issue. And so you’ll see, like in New Hampshire, where the Republicans have regained control of the legislature, they might try to repeal the gay marriage law there that’s a couple years old. You saw judges in Iowa who lost their jobs because they voted in favor of gay marriage last year. So it’s—this issue is always sort of two steps forward, one step back.

LAWTON: It’s been a difficult issue for a lot of people in the religious community whose religious beliefs teach that homosexuality is a sin, and that rubs up against civil rights and so you get to this very difficult place. So I was struck this past year by how people were examining their rhetoric, and you had the anti-gay bullying, the very tragic cases of young gay people committing suicide, and then people in the religious community looking at their rhetoric to say is it possible to oppose homosexuality without being a bully or appearing to be discriminating, and it’s a very difficult issue for a lot of people in the religious community, and how that gets worked out in society has been a challenge and will continue to be so.

ABERNETHY: And E.J., we had this interesting split within the Catholic Church this past year over the health care bill and the bishops on one side and the Catholic Health Association on the other—a lot of nuns.

DIONNE: This was a huge split. I just want to go back to the gay issue for one moment. The passage of don’t ask, don’t tell—it’s hard, I think, to fully appreciate how big a move that is. Think of where we were 15 years ago, and it passed because a number of Republican senators decided that a) they were for it on principal, but b) this is now the more popular position in the country. So we still have a lot of arguments over gay marriage, but the status of gay people has changed radically in this country in a very short time. To go to your question, this was a huge fight in the Catholic Church, and it’s going to have repercussions, where you really had a dispute over what the bill actually said. You had the Catholic bishops insisting that the language in the bill could still lead to federal financing of abortion. You had the Catholic Health Care Association, which is pro-life, and quite a large group of nuns who are also pro-life, saying we looked at this language; this bill does not finance abortion. And I think this has sort of implications for which side will the Catholic Church be on in a lot of other fights. Catholic social teaching, there’s always been a kind of amalgam: very pro-life on abortion but very much in favor of social justice. In this bill those two kind of collided. The Catholic Health Association said there is no conflict here, and I think you’re going to see a lot more arguments in the church about this in the coming several years.

ABERNETHY: And back to what you were saying before, Kevin. There’s a difference, isn’t there, between being for don’t ask don’t tell and on the other hand having that spill over into gay marriage. There’s a lot of resistance to gay marriage.

ECKSTROM: That’s right. There has been a 30-point shift in the last 15 or so years on the question of gays in the military. The shift on whether or not gays should be allowed to be married is somewhere more like in the five to ten range. It’s still very on the border of being a majority or minority of Americans who support it.

DIONNE: Although you still now have a substantial majority who support either gay marriage or civil unions. Civil unions in a very short time has gone from being a rather advanced or very liberal position to being a kind of middle-of-the-road position.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, quickly, are the Episcopalians still divided over gay bishops?

LAWTON: Many, many mainline Protestant denominations have been very divided over issues surrounding homosexuality/ Not just gay bishops—whether gay clergy can be in the pulpit, and gay marriage, whether their clergy can actually perform a same-sex marriage. So this has been and will continue to be a very difficult issue for many religious groups.

ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up. I wanted to ask each of you as you look back on the year whether you see something that we didn’t pay enough attention to—underreported. Who wants to begin? Kim?

LAWTON: Well, I was very struck by the Gulf oil spill and how that was an occasion for many conservative religious people to get a little more environmentally friendly. You saw Southern Baptists and others very struck by that tragedy and taking a look at some of their environmental positions.

ABERNETHY: Kevin?

ECKSTROM: I was struck by the change in rhetoric from the Mormon Church, actually, on the gay issue, where after the Prop 8 ruling came out and the gay bullying came, the church said, you know, we’ve been discriminated against in the past. We need to be much more careful about how we discriminate.

ABERNETHY: E.J.?

DIONNE: The decline of traditional culture-war politics on the one side and the rise of a different kind of cultural fight around immigration, Islam, Hispanics. I think that’s a shift we are going to be thinking about for a long time.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to you, many thanks. Our time is up. Many thanks to E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and Kim Lawton of this program.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Violent demonstrations broke out in Haiti this week over allegations of fraud in the recent presidential election—this on top of the growing cholera epidemic. Several relief organizations say the unrest has been preventing them from treating the thousands of Haitians suffering from the illness. More than 2,000 people have died and more than 100,000 have become sick. Our managing editor Kim Lawton has been talking to relief workers in Haiti. Kim, what do they tell you?

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Well, they’re telling me that the situation is a lot more difficult than many people here may realize. The political unrest, protests in the streets, sometimes violent clashes have really created a situation where it’s hard for people to get around. Many of the relief groups and the faith-based groups have been on lockdown for several days in Port-au-Prince, but also in other cities around Haiti.

ABERNETHY: Lockdown meaning they don’t go anywhere?

LAWTON: They are told don’t go anywhere. Don’t go on the streets. And I understand that you can’t even get anywhere if you try to get on the streets. There are these big barricades and even stones and rocks. Sadly, Haitians are dragging rubble from the earthquake that still hasn’t been cleared away—they are dragging that into the streets so people can’t get around, which means the workers can’t get to the cholera clinics. They can’t get to the rebuilding projects, and it just puts all of that help further back.

ABERNETHY: And as you indicated it does seem as if it’s worse than a lot of us had thought.

LAWTON: Well, as you know I was supposed to be down there right now with a TV crew for our program, and our flight got cancelled. There was an Episcopal delegation with the presiding bishop of the US Episcopal Church. Their flight got—their plans got canceled, postponed anyway. They are trying to figure out what to do. A lot of people can’t come and go because the airports have been closed. That’s how bad the situation has been.

ABERNETHY: Yeah, and all this pent-up furry from a year ago when the earthquake—almost a year—when the earthquake hit, it just must have magnified the response to the election results.

LAWTON: Well, some of the people I have been talking to say this protest and all of this violence isn’t just about politics and the election. It’s about the frustration of the people and their plight so long with, you know, not having a place to live. A million-and-a-half people still living in tents and tarps, now the cholera epidemic, and they’re just very frustrated.